Woman holding a a black chicken. They both look towards the camera.Mama is at home with a bedrid­den Papa, tick­ing through life with con­stant rounds of wash­ing, gar­den­ing, and meal mak­ing. Her fam­i­ly doesn’t vis­it as often as she’d like so she spends a lot of time in her gar­den.  When a cheeky chick­en starts scratch­ing around Mama is quite upset. The chick­en grad­u­al­ly wins her over and Mama tells it all her secrets.

Goret­ti Chad­wick is excel­lent as Mama. At the start she bus­tles around the car­toon bright set (pro­duc­tion design­er John Park­er) fid­dling with the plants and threat­en­ing aphids. The two raised gar­dens and small clothes line give us a false sense of bright­ness and enclose Mama in domes­tic life. The chick­en (cre­at­ed by Helen Fuller) is gor­geous. Pup­pet­ed by Haanz Fa’avae-Jackson it is delight­ful­ly bird-like and pro­vides a non-judge­men­tal lis­ten­er for Mama to talk to. As Mama talks to the chick­en about cur­rent and past events we start to under­stand why the chil­dren and grand­chil­dren might not be not be vis­it­ing.  Play­wright David Fa’auliuli Mamea includes some shock­ing rev­e­la­tions about var­i­ous rela­tion­ships and direc­tor Fasitua Amosa keeps the ten­sion high in the final sec­tion. This is where Chad­wick real­ly shines and we see through Mama’s facade.

A sweet show with depth.

Still Life with Chick­ens on at Cir­ca The­atre to 2 June 2018